New VW Tiguan a standout handsome purchase

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Regardless of any recent unpleasantness (and we’ll come to that), Volkswagens largely aren’t the stuff of luxury channels like this. The obvious exception is the Golf GTI. Celebrating 40 years in 2016, and still largely a law unto itself, the GTI is a product — a brand even — that forged its own definition. Its class comes from the sheer impossibility of classifying it. I love that car.

“The first generation was not exactly unattractive, more bland. You wouldn’t look like you out-smarted anyone on the school run, more like you just didn’t care. And not in a good way”

But what of other VWs? While it can be argued they are expensive Skodas, they most certainly are not cheap Audis. Take a look at the relative prices of Golfs and Audi A3s (same car under the skin) if you don’t believe me. Given that Audi’s provenance is atomised (it has four different carmaker’s DNA in it generic profile) and VW’s stems from one single car – one of the world’s half-dozen most fondly remembered at that – and there’s certainly a case to be argued that VW’s story is the more authentic, the more romantic one. (Authenticity and romance go a long way in luxury).

That the Beetle was, at its core, an honourable endeavour and, like Apple’s Macintosh or Burberry’s Trench, one on which an empire has been built rather seals it, doesn’t it? Not quite.

The new VW Tiguan R-Line

What sealed it for me was when I started noticing just how many big black VW Touaregs there are on the roads around the smart little corner of Oxfordshire where I live, a part of the world when one in four cars are Land Rovers, or more likely Range Rovers. At first I though I was just seeing the same car over and over but no; smart folk around me really get the Touareg.

The new VW Tiguan R-Line

I like this fact; the Touareg has been/will be the source materiel for various Porsche Cayennes, Audi Q7s and the Bentley Bentayga even. There is, in short, huge humble brag potential in driving a one. It may be a little under the radar but is that a bad thing when it comes to owning and driving a large SUV? It’s not like it isn’t handsome and it is beautifully built. Solid as a rock I would imagine given that it comes out of VW’s Bratislava factory which also makes the Porsche and the Audi. Marriage material indeed. Did I just give you the ultimate luxury hack?

The new VW Tiguan R-Line

No. Actually it seems I’m well behind the curve on this one; VW sold nearly 5,000 of its £44,000 Touaregs in the UK last year, up from 3,600 in 2014. And now the Touareg has an all-new little brother, the second generation Tiguan with similar ambition to bust in to the premium markets. In shorthand Tiguans are Golf-sized SUVs. Given the global popularity of a) Golfs and b) SUVs it sounds like a winning formula. And it has proven to be so — built on three different continents VW has sold 2.64 million Tiguans in seven short years. The first generation model was not exactly unattractive, more bland. You wouldn’t look like you out-smarted anyone on the school run, more like you just didn’t care. And not in a good way

The new VW Tiguan R-Line

Which was a shame because it was a good car. But now it doesn’t matter because there is a new Tiguan which is set to be a the source material for a whole new extended family of VW SUVs and it’s the first in the sector to use the company’s latest architecture so everything about it — from its safety, to its technology, to its efficiency…. to its emissions — is where VW is at right now. What’s more it looks great. The basic car gets whiff of the bigger Touareg which is just about enough to bring its standing in the world up to Audi Q3 standards, but opt for the R-Line spec and the new Tiguan is a standout handsome purchase, a lot less gawky than the Q3 which is any case does not benefit from all that new platform thinking.

So that means the bigger, roomier new Tiguan gets fancy, reconfigurable digital instruments, head up displays and an OS for your phone and navigation and stuff that’s as good as anything out there and will also run Apple Carplay. There’s also stuff like pedestrian monitoring, emergency brake assist calibrated for city driving and — in the pipeline — the inevitable plug-in hybrid.

The new VW Tiguan R-Line

So what’s stopping you, given that the new Tiguan drives at least as well as anything else in the class, and many ways better? That unpleasant business with the sneaky code? I’d understand if it maybe did, but the evidence would suggest you’d be making a largely solitary stance.

Besides I still maintain that a generation or so from now, once we have said goodbye to the internal combustion engine and the frankly bizarre practice of cramming our cities — the places least able to clear their own lungs — with millions of little units all doing their best to turn the air brown we’ll see VW’s spectacular error of judgement having a silver lining. It did after all make us think just that little bit more about local air quality.… Maybe that slightly contrarian little thought will make you think differently about VW… though frankly I think inverse badge-snobbery is more than enough incentive.